It's kind of a mixed bag," says Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones' upcoming album, which the band is now mixing in London for late-summer release. "It's got some rockers and some blues tunes and some ballads and a couple of strange things." Strange? "They're sort of odd sounding," he says. "They don't sound totally as the Rolling Stones of old. But most of it is very recognizable as the band. There's one or two rockers from the slam-bang school, and then there's one rocker that's slightly more danceable."

Jagger says it's likely that all of the album's songs will be Mick Jagger-Keith Richards collaborations. And what about relations between the two? "We got on quite well when we just got down to work," says Jagger. "We were in Barbados living in this little house for two or three weeks, just playing guitar in a room. We just wrote the songs." So all of that snide bantering in the press was just an inside joke? "Well, not completely," says Mick. "A bit of it was."

Jagger says there are as yet no guests on the album. "We don't have any star guests at the moment, but you never know – maybe we will before our time is up."